WHEN DOES wrongdoing – or allegations of it – disqualify someone from holding elected office?
Thanks to an ongoing stream of Massachusetts pols who manage to land in hot water, that question is getting a good airing out.
The latest public figure in the unwanted spotlight: Chris Flanagan, a Cape Cod state rep whose short tenure in office has already been marked by a long trail of trouble.
Earlier this month, Barnstable police issued a cryptic statement saying in October the department “received a report that alleged potential criminal activity involving Christopher Flanagan,” and that the US attorney’s office took over the probe last month.
In response, the Massachusetts Republican Party last week called for the Democratic lawmaker’s “immediate resignation.” Though Flanagan has not been charged with any crimes, the party said if he doesn’t quit the Democratic supermajority in the House should take action to expel him.
Last month, the calls for a pol to pack it in were directed at Boston City Councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson, after she was indicted by federal grand jury in a kickback scheme in which she is alleged to have awarded a raise to a relative on her council staff who then funneled $7,000 of that money back to her.
Mayor Michelle Wu and five of Fernandes Anderson’s council colleagues, including City Council President Ruthzee Louijeune, called on her to resign.
“Like any member of the community, Councilor Fernandes Anderson has the right to a fair legal process,” Wu said in a statement. “But the serious nature of these charges undermine the public trust and will prevent her from effectively serving the city.”
Louijeune, like Wu a Harvard Law School grad, took pains not to conflate the legal proceedings Fernandes Anderson is facing with the question of what’s the right course of action concerning the office she holds. “Councilor Fernandes Anderson has every right to due process in a court of law,” Louijeune said in a statement. “Given the severity of the allegations brought against her, and the direct impact that they have on residents’ ability to see the Boston City Council as their faithful stewards, it is the best interest of the body that she resign.”
As the resignation calls make clear, elected officials charged with wrongdoing may face a reckoning in a court of law, but that is distinct from the judgement rendered in the court of public opinion.
Should that judgement include calls to resign when an official has not been convicted of any crimes?
“I don’t think there’s a clear answer on that,” said Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia Law School and authority on government ethics. He said whether such calls seem warranted can “depend on how serious the charges are” and how strong a case prosecutors seem to have with regard to both “the facts and the law.”
When it comes to Flanagan, there is no case at all to pass a judgement on. But in the court of public opinion, for both Flanagan and Fernandes Anderson, their reputations preceded them in ways that are hardly helpful to their cause.
In November, the Globe reported that police were investigating Flanagan after his former employer, the Home Builders and Remodelers Association of Cape Cod, filed a complaint accusing him of misappropriating thousands of dollars. Last April, CommonWealth Beacon reported that Flanagan’s campaign committee paid a $6,000 fine and he personally paid $9,000 to settle a case brought by the Office of Campaign and Political Finance. State regulators said Flanagan repeatedly lied to them during their probe of a shady campaign scheme that involved concocting a group to make it appear that Flanagan had support from Republican-leaning voters.
“It’s just a pattern of behavior that I think lowers the level of trust in public office,” said Mass. GOP chairwoman Amy Carnevale, in explaining the party’s call for Flanagan to resign. “It’s reached a point where we said this is not a partisan or a political issue but a matter of trust.”
Flanagan, did not respond to a message on Tuesday, but last week characterized the call for him to resign as “political mudslinging.”
Fernandes Anderson, who has resisted calls to step down following her indictment, was already facing questions about campaign finance irregularities in the months prior to the federal charges. Separately, in 2023, she was fined $5,000 by the state Ethics Commission, which said she violated state law by hiring family members to serve on her council staff.
Last week, the Boston city council rejected a call by City Councilor Ed Flynn to create an ethics committee. In an interview, Louijeune, the council president, said the state Ethics Commission has jurisdiction over municipal officials and she thought it would be a mistake for a small body like the 13-member council to form its own committee to look at allegations of wrongdoing.
“Issues can easily become politicized, and we don’t want colleagues standing as judge and jury against fellow councilors,” she said.
Outside of such a formal structure, however, Louijeune – like four of her colleagues and Wu – concluded it would serve the council best if Fernandes Anderson resigned.
Briffault, the Columbia ethics expert, said it’s “not inappropriate for someone to call for the resignation” of a public official who has not yet been convicted of any crime. “I just don’t think there’s a clear standard” for when it is justified.
The elephant in the ethics room now looming over all such debates, of course, will soon walk back into the White House. When Donald Trump is inaugurated next week as president for the second time he’ll head back into office carrying a conviction on 34 felony counts and under the cloud of federal criminal investigations that were aborted only because of his return to power.
When it comes to maintaining high standards for the behavior of public officials, Briffault worries that the fish may rot from head down. “Trump is an ongoing ethics violation,” he said. “So how do state and local ethics rules apply when the president of the country doesn’t take them seriously?”
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